


A Question To The Universe

by FictionPenned



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Treasure Planet AU, fun space romp anybody?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25594192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: There’s a community lurking in everyone else’s in-between, and as small and inconsequential as it might seem to the captains that anchor their ships here overnight, that community is Ryan’s whole world. He’s spent his entire life watching ships sail into port on the solar currents — seen his planet’s twin moons shining through their crisp white sails and caught the gleam of their wooden hulls and gaped at the majestic figureheads that grace their bows, and though he was once bold enough to get near enough to touch the side of one of those ships, he’s never actually boarded one. He’s never been off-planet. He’s never had a chance to be a traveler.When a magically resurrecting stranger hands Ryan Sinclair a legendary map, Ryan, Graham, and Yaz suddenly find themselves swept away on an interplanetary adventure.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan), Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	A Question To The Universe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [picnokinesis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/picnokinesis/gifts).



The steady drip of water onto the floor of the parlor marks every second of Ryan’s deepening embarrassment.

He didn’t intend to cause a fuss. He just wanted to have a bit of fun on a solar board, and it’s not his fault that he’s terrible at flying the thing. He’s been trying to get better at it — trying to lessen the disconnect between thought and reflex — but judging by the fact that he found himself plunging headfirst into a lake on someone else’s private property, he still has a long way to go. Which is a right shame, especially since now he doesn’t even have a board to practice on. It’s a sunken wreck at the bottom of that lake somewhere, and he’s not even allowed to recover it because of some unfair and arbitrary rule or another. The board is his property, and so far as he sees it, he should be allowed to get it out of somebody’s stupid lake without being hauled off in irons. Of course, he could get it back legally if the lake belonged to anyone agreeable — by knocking on the front door of the owner in question and asking for permission, but unfortunately — that house and that body of water both belong to the least agreeable person in this whole system — a toothy, money-grubbing, blue-faced fellow with absolutely no regard for basic decency.

Just his luck, isn’t it?

There’s a small puddle gathered around his feet by the time his nan, Grace, opens the door to release her final patient of the day.

It takes her only a couple of seconds to register the problem, eyes narrowing sharply as she notes first her grandson’s sopping wet clothes and then the pool of water on the floor, though she holds her comments back until her patient has scooted her way past Ryan and closed the door behind him. 

“What happened?” she finally asks, words carried on a weary sigh that speaks to the exhaustion of her day.

Guilt tightens in Ryan’s stomach. He doesn’t intend to cause problems. He knows his nan has been struggling. Grace is the only doctor on this side of the planet, the only person that the residents here can visit in hopes of finding healing. She opens her doors to everyone regardless of whether or not they are able to pay — believes in helping people because it’s the right thing to do, even if it means sometimes having to make do with less. She’s an amazing woman, the sort of person that everybody should strive to be, and he’s felt like a drain on her time and energy lately. He doesn’t mean to be. He’s just keeps making little mistakes and finding himself in unfortunate circumstances.

“Fell into the lake,” Ryan says with a shrug, turning his palms upward in a tiny gesture of resignation. “Lost my board, too. Hit it at the wrong angle.”

“Can you get it back?” Grace asks, tilting her head, and looking at him with a kind yet tired gaze.

Ryan breathes out of his nose. This is the tricky part; the part that he’s been dreading since the moment he hit the water. “Nah. Didn’t land in the proper lake. Landed in Tzim-Sha’s lake.” He squeezes his eyes shut and purses his lips, waiting for his nan’s disappointment to strike him down.

It doesn’t. Not yet, anyway.

“What were you doing over there?”

The true answer isn’t a good one, and Ryan knows that, but he offers it anyway. “Got lost. I’m bad at controlling the thing, you know I am. I’ve been trying though, and I _was_ getting a lot better. Not that it matters. Not like I’m going to be able to get it back now. It’s just going to grow some weird glowing barnacles and rot. Maybe an archaeologist will recover it five hundred years from now or something when Tzim-Sha finally eats it.” There’s a pause before he adds, “Or a bit quicker if he gets murdered or something. Guy like that has got to have enemies.”

“ _Ryan._ ” Grace doesn’t have to yell in order to make herself heard. She merely leans into his name, giving it weight and meaning and channeling a dozen thoughts directly behind it.

Ryan gets the message.

“I’m going to towel off and get changed before I catch a cold or something.” He is halfway up the stairs before the words finish leaving his mouth.

Grace calls up after him. “If you put your clothes in the basket outside of your door, I’ll put them on the line to dry.”

He hears her, but he doesn’t respond. He’s embarrassed and upset, and he very much wants to be alone right now. He needs a distraction, something to make him feel like less of a failure, something that takes the world and offers it meaning that it doesn’t usually have. They don’t have much. Entertainment is hard to come by on a quick-stop planet like this. It’s a place designed for the travelers who are just passing through, not for people to live on, but somehow, the people in charge always forget that people have to live in those kinds of places. People have to run inns and be doctors and own supply shops.

There’s a community lurking in everyone else’s in-between, and as small and inconsequential as it might seem to the captains that anchor their ships here overnight, that community is Ryan’s whole world. He’s spent his entire life watching ships sail into port on the solar currents — seen the planet’s twin moons shining through their crisp white sails and caught the gleam of their wooden hulls and gaped at the majestic figureheads that grace their bows, and though he was once bold enough to get near enough to touch the side of one of those ships, he’s never actually boarded one. He’s never been off-planet. He’s never had a chance to be a traveler.

Ryan likes to think that he was built for adventure — that if something came knocking, he’d spring after it without a second thought — but he also knows that he has a responsibility to stay here. For all his dreams of pirates and distant worlds and basking in the light of strange stars, he has a life in this in-between place. His home is here. His family is here. He owes it to Grace to try to be the best grandson that he can be, even if he sometimes flounders.

Once he’s in warm, dry clothes, Ryan feels a bit better. He breathes a bit easier, feels less like he wants to melt into the floorboards and disappear.

As he sticks his head into the hallway to drop his sodden clothes into the laundry basket, he hears the front door open downstairs. That’d be Graham, back from a shift spent manning the shuttle service.

Graham’s not really Ryan’s granddad. His actual grandad died a long time ago — so long ago, in fact, that Ryan barely remembers him — but Grace recently decided to remarry. Ryan figures that Graham’s a decent enough guy, if a bit of a stick in the mud sometimes, but he’s not really ready to start calling him granddad or consider him part of the family just yet. In Ryan’s relatively short life, he’s lost a lot of people, and that makes it hard to open up sometimes. He just can’t help but feel like he’s going to be hurt again, that as soon as he lets someone else in, he’s going to lose them.

Rather than venture downstairs and face the shame of recounting the day’s events for a second time, Ryan moves to his window, throwing open the curtains and looking out at the night sky. He can see a ship now — traipsing between the stars, soaring in on an unseen solar current.For a moment, he thinks it looks like a proper pirate ship — the sort of thing that dominated the stories that he consumed as a child — but a sharp turn brings the _RLS_ prefix stamped upon the hull into full view.

Just a naval ship.

Nothing fun.

He closes the curtains again and settles into his bed. It’s a bit early to sleep, but he doesn’t want to do much else. There’s a handheld game tucked in a drawer somewhere, but he’s played it a hundred times. Additionally, the books beneath his bed promise adventures that he’ll never get to have himself, and he knows that no amount of petty distraction will change the fact that his board is at the bottom of that _accursed lake._

He pulls a blanket over his head, and eventually the anger, frustration, and embarrassmentof the day’s failures fade enough to allow him to fall into the grasp of sleep.

Hours later, insistent banging on the front door rouses Ryan from that very sleep.

Since his nan sees patients from within the house, it’s not completely unusual for there to be late night callers. Most of the time, such emergencies are the result of an unexpected onset of labor or the results of a drunken brawl at the spaceport, neither of which draw his interest or demand that he drag himself out of his bed to see what might be going on, however, this time, when the door opens, he hears a familiar voice filter up the stairs — frantic and desperate and insistent.

“I don’t know who he is. He visited the inn and then he just collapsed in the middle of the floor. Said something about being chased?”

Ryan has known Yasmin Khan since they were both little, an unremarkable thing in a community as small as theirs. They’re not friends, exactly — Ryan doesn’t consider himself a person with many friends — but they’re acquaintances. He’ll occasionally pop over to the Benbow Inn bearing a gift for her family from his nan or a message to post on the bulletin board and end up having a chat with her, but they’ve never swapped secrets or talked about anything meaningful.

However, he does know her well enough to know that she’s always been pretty unshakable, a trait that aligned well with her goals of one day getting off of this halfway to nowhere planet and joining the Navy. Anything that makes Yaz that worried must be either noteworthy or horrible, and though he does not want to bear witness to a tragedy, his interest in the strange and unusual is strong enough to drag him out of bed and send him fumbling for a dressing gown and a pair of slippers.

He keeps his hand on the bannister as he descends the stairs, checking his balance and trying to make sure that he doesn’t become the second unexpected patient of the night.

In the front hall, an unconscious figure is changing hands, being moved from being supported on Yaz’s shoulder to being carried by both Grace and Graham. Yaz looks just as harried as her voice had sounded from upstairs. Her dress has been pulled askew, her hair is desperately trying to escape the braid that contains it, and her eyes move between the man that she carried here and the two heads of this household with hypervigilant intensity, overlooking Ryan’s presence all together.

“You got a good grip?” Grace asks Graham with a pointed look and a nod. Tiredness rings her eyes, but as always, she has stepped into the role of professional with seamless ease, throwing off her exhaustion and her interrupted night as if they were nothing of consequence.

“I may have grey hair, but I’m not that old,” Graham replies with a humor that is, perhaps, a tad bit inappropriate given the circumstances, but no one bothers to question it. That’s just the way Graham has always been when things begin to get dicey — he tries to lighten the mood with a brisk statement or a biting observation or a bit of distraction that makes the air feel a bit less suffocating.

“I can help, if you need it,” Ryan offers, stepping off the final stair and finally releasing his grip on the railing, but both Graham and his nan shake their heads.

“We’ve got it.”

Yaz, on the other hand, doesn’t ask how she can help. She merely ducks around the patient-toting couple to open the door to the examining room, holding it open while they pass through.

Internally, Ryan kicks himself. He ought to have done that, ought to have just jumped right in and found a way to help without waiting for an invitation, ought to have proven that he’s good for something other than crashing expensive solar boards into out-of-bounds lakes. Though he is horribly tempted to slink back up the stairs and pretend that he was never here, curiosity pulls him along in its wake, and he slips through the doors, too, following closely behind the rest of the group.

“Who is he?” he asks Yaz as Grace and Graham lay the guy on the table.

The stranger looks rather unremarkable, insofar as people go. Humanoid, light-skinned, dark hair that’s almost definitely dyed, with a face that does little in the way of communicating his actual age, though Ryan always thinks that people look a bit younger when they’re asleep or passed out. There’s something about not being awake that sands away rough edges and takes away the toll of years. His clothes, too, are fairly typical for the sort of people who pass through here. His jacket is long and pseudo-military, like the sort of thing a mercenary might wear. The only thing of note, really, is the noticeably bulging of his pockets.

 _Maybe he’s a thief,_ Ryan thinks. _Maybe that’s why he wound up on the wrong side of being chased._

Ryan watches as his nan’s capable fingers seek out a pulse. Her lips purse for a second as she lingers on a place on the man’s neck, and a second later, she moves to his wrist. That, too, must have been disappointing, because she releases it a second later.

“I think he might be past our help,” she says on the tail of a quiet sigh.

Graham’s eyes find the floor. Yaz sits back on her heels and crosses her arms. Ryan does nothing.

Death is not an uncommon visitor in the confines of this home, either on a personal level or a professional level. His nan’s lost plenty of patients before. Not everyone can be saved. Sometimes illness and injuries are too great to overcome or help comes too late to be useful. Part of being a doctor is knowing that death is an ever-present reality, and recognizing it as a fact of life rather than its opposite.

“Do you know what ship he came in on?” Graham asks, turning his attention to Yaz as he runs a hand across his chin. “We could return the body to them. Make sure he ends up in the right place with the right rites.”

Yaz shakes her head. “He came in alone. I’ve never seen him before. I can ask around though, see if I can figure it out by morning.”

“I think —“ Grace starts to respond, but she’s interrupted by a sudden, sharp intake of breath as the body convulses on the table.

Four heads snap in the direction of the noise, and four sets of eyes bear witness to the man’s sudden resurrection.

Even Grace takes a moment to process the sudden change, standing uncharacteristically stunned for the duration of a long, slow blink before rushing to the man’s side to support him as he struggles into a seated position.

The stranger coughs, clearing debris from his lungs and reinvigorating frozen muscles.

Ryan flinches reflexively. The dead, he knows how to deal with. The dead-turned-living-again, however? He’s never seen that before. People from all across a dozen systems pass through here, and he’s never once heard tell of the suddenly undead. Once the surprise passes, he takes an inexorable half-step forward, as if to get a better look at the guy, but a quick, concerned glance from Yaz stops him short. It’s probably not a great idea to get on the bad side of someone who can die and come back to life.

“Are they here?” the dead man asks as soon almost as soon as he seems able to speak, bright blue eyes sweeping across the alarmed group of witnesses. “The bastard didn’t get it, did he? The cyber-augmented —“ Another great heaving cough cuts him short, and Grace braces a hand against his chest, holding him steady.

“Ryan, the scope please,” she says quickly, nodding at a device mounted to the wall directly behind him.

“Oh, right,” Ryan says quickly, both glad to be useful and frustrated that he didn’t think of grabbing it before he was asked. He turns and takes it in his hand, crossing the few steps across the room and handing it to his nan. All the while, he keeps his eyes on the mysterious stranger, just in case he lashes out or does anything else out of the ordinary.

For all he knows, he might be a violent creature of legend, ripped from a planet somewhere in another universe.

The others watch quietly as Grace assesses the stranger’s vitals with an unmatched degree of quickness. “Everything seems normal,” she says as she finally steps back, holding out the scope to Ryan again. With a small nod of acknowledgement, Ryan accepts it and crosses back to the place next to the door to rehang it in its designated place.

“It better be,” the man says with a sniff. “Don’t know where I’d be if it wasn’t. Can’t stick around here long, though, they’ll be after me.”

“Who’ll be after you?” Graham interjects, taking a step forward himself. “Where did you come from? Do you have a name?”

The stranger considers the series a questions for a moment, head tilting as his bright eyes regard the silver-haired man before him. After a long pause, a grin splits his face that seems entirely at odds with the situation. “Captain Jack Harkness from nowhere in particular, and I’d really best be off before I drag you all into waters that are too deep for you. You seem like nice people. Quaint place. Good energy. Best for all of us if I’m off, really."

At the conclusion of the quick-spoken string of thoughts, the man who calls himself Jack shrugs and leaps off the table is a swirl of worn coattails and with a degree of vigor that should, by all rights, lie entirely beyond the grasp of someone whose heart just started beating again, striding confidently towards the door to make his exit.

Ryan’s the only person that stands between the undead man and the door, and he does not hesitate before stepping sideways and out of the way. His nan might raise a fuss about letting the guy go that easily, but he sees no reason why someone who seems perfectly healthy ought to be forced to stay in a doctor’s care longer than he wants to be.

Despite Ryan’s tacit and silent agreement to let the man be on his way, Jack Harkness pauses for a second as he passes him, reaching into one of his bugling pockets and slipping something into Ryan’s own with the deft and subtle touch of a sleight of hand magician.

“Keep an eye on this, will you?”

There’s a whisper of a wink and a tight smile, Ryan doesn’t have a chance to muster an answer before the man is out the door, disappearing without another word and leaving four wide-eyed and open-mouthed people in his wake, all of whom desperately want to talk about what just happened but lack the proper words to do so.

It’s Graham who finally buckles up the will to break the silence.

“Well, that certainly was something, wasn’t it?"

No one bothers to argue.


End file.
